Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom

by Mimi Sheller

Overview

Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictions and damaging exclusions of subaltern self-empowerment, Sheller roots out from beneath the historical archive traces of a deeper freedom, one expressed through bodily performances, familial relationships, cultivation of the land, and sacred worship.

Attending to the hidden linkages among intimate realms and the public sphere, Sheller explores specific struggles for freedom, including women's political activism in Jamaica; the role of discourses of "manhood" in the making of free subjects, soldiers, and citizens; the fiercely ethnonationalist discourses that excluded South Asian and African indentured workers; the sexual politics of the low-bass beats and "bottoms up" moves in the dancehall; and the struggle for reproductive and LGBT rights and against homophobia in the contemporary Caribbean. Through her creative use of archival sources and emphasis on the connections between intimacy, violence, and citizenship, Sheller enriches critical theories of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in all post-slavery societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822349532
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/07/2012
Series:	Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology at Drexel University and the author of Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica and Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies.

Read an Excerpt

CITIZENSHIP FROM BELOW

Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom

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By MIMI SHELLER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4934-1

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Chapter One

History from the Bottom(s) Up

Although the dismantling of the Atlantic system of slavery is crucial to the political processes by which citizenship was remade from below, the post-slavery Caribbean has yet to have a major presence in the literature on subaltern practices of citizenship. The study of post-emancipation social relations in the Caribbean is a key area in recent British and North American historiography, but historians still remain largely focused on elite discourses and ideologies (in part because of the nature of the archives available) and do not engage directly with questions of embodiment, performativity, and sexual subjectivities as crucial to politics. To truly write a history of embodied freedom, and to understand its contemporary limitations and possibilities, we need better accounts of the emergence of inter-bodily relations in the aftermath of slavery. Although some very interesting work is grappling with the meaning and practice of freedom in the Caribbean, both retrospectively and prospectively (Wilmot 2009), it mostly fails to address directly the complex intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The number of monographs on women and slavery in the Caribbean is growing, and several landmark edited collections on gender and race in Caribbean history have been published, but still surprisingly few monographs addressing more subtle forms of "biopower" in the making of freedom in a theoretically rigorous and extended treatment of the complexities of the Caribbean.

The close relationship between intimacy, violence, citizenship, and the state must come to the fore in studies of slavery and emancipation, which can no longer avoid the ironies that "riddled the event of emancipation," as Saidiya Hartman (1997: 126) puts it: "How does one narrate a story of freedom when confronted with the discrepant legacy of emancipation and the decidedly circumscribed avenues available to the freed? What does autonomy mean in a context of coercion, hunger, and uncertainty?" As she has shown, aspects of manhood, domesticity, and responsible productivity and reproduction were all crucially at stake in the fashioning of free subjects. This book is offered as a contribution to an emerging historical analysis and critical theory of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in post-slavery societies. Indeed, the intersectionality of these dimensions is arguably the prime theoretical paradigm driving the analysis of black diaspora cultural and political formations generally (Collins 2000, 2004; Spelman 1990). The time is overdue for Caribbean historiography to revisit histories of emancipation in relation to more recent understandings of sexual citizenship and the sexual state. In contrast to the existing mainstream of post-emancipation historiography and studies of post-slavery freedom, this book pays more attention to subaltern discourses and interventions in the public sphere and explores the relations between multiple subaltern positions. Most importantly, it reclaims the disavowed realms of the vulgar, including the lower regions of the body politic and the excluded realms of the bodily, the sexual, and the spiritual, which Lyndon Gill (2010: 301) has so usefully theorized as "erotic subjectivity." This is an "interpretive frame that highlights the spectacular and quotidian interworking of the political, the sensual and the spiritual"—a topic to which I return later.

There is a growing need to bridge understandings of citizenship derived from the "second-wave" historical sociology that focused on "authoritative state power," on the one hand, and "third-wave" (Foucauldian) approaches that attend to "disciplinary power dispersed throughout the social landscape," on the other hand (Adams et al. 2005: 12). In the late 1980s and early 1990s historical sociologists and theoretically oriented historians began to develop a more practice-oriented framework for citizenship studies that began "recognizing popular social practices as expressions of citizenship identities" (Somers 2005: 463). Margaret Somers (2005) builds on T. H. Marshall's triad of civil, political, and social rights to highlight the prehistory of citizenship before juridically defined rights and obligations exist. Thus, she argues that citizenship is an "instituted process," showing how in specific local contexts within Britain (and, we might add, its colonies) there were varying "community capacities for participatory association" that interacted with the national legal structure to produce different political cultures of citizenship and different potentially available structures and capacities for appropriating public institutions (Somers 1993, 1994). In line with broader shifts within socio-legal studies, it is not sufficient to look at the letter of the law alone, or at the formal constitution of the state-citizen relation, without also understanding its situated practice, including among colonial and enslaved populations. This more cultural and discursive model of citizenship as a locally instituted practice—spread across the metropolitan and colonial worlds—can be fruitfully combined with performative models of gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual subjectivity.

One of the key arguments of this book is that to act and make claims as a free citizen, political subjects must first position themselves as raced, gendered, national, and sexual subjects of particular kinds (i.e., as free men, or heads of patriarchal families, or good mothers, or British subjects, or loyal soldiers) in discursive performances that always rest on the exclusion or repulsion of others. Thus, the very performativity of citizenship is one of the crucial ways in which political subjectivity translates into differentiated embodiments. Citizenship can be understood as a set of intertwined practices and collective repertoires for defining, legitimating, and exercising the rights of some bodies against others: who can occupy public space, who can speak in public, who can bear arms, who can vote? Who does the state have an obligation to protect, and who is empowered to judge, punish, and imprison others? Who can own property, protect their privacy, or make contracts, oaths, and wills? And just as significant, who can marry whom, who can be a legal parent or guardian of a child? Who can have sex with whom, and what sex acts are proscribed? To answer such questions is not simply a matter of mapping these distinctions onto pre-existing social cleavages. Rather, in answering these practical yet morally charged questions, we can begin to see how states and citizens applied a set of techniques and practices of differentiation that both united and divided a population along particular lines. It is through these "institutionally embedded practices" and local "contexts of activation" of citizenship, as Somers (1993) puts it, that the surface effects (and deeper reiterations) of corporeal difference are relationally performed.

At the same time, the focus on embodied performance and spatial relations alerts us to the extra-discursive and non-representational forces on which exercises of citizenship are always grounded: bodies in motion and in contact, gazes and counter-gazes, intimate gestures, and attractions and repulsions just below the surface of formal interaction. The body as a colonial "contact zone" (Pratt 1992) has been taken up as a way and a method "to see with particular vividness the variety of somatic territories that modern states have identified as the grounds for defining and policing the normal, the deviant, the pathological, and, of course, the primitive" (Ballantyne and Burton 2005: 406). Focusing on the discursive and performative mobilization of citizenship as an embedded practice in various post-slavery settings, I explore how intimate bodily encounters within disciplined workplaces (including domestic ones), organized public and semipublic spaces, and counter-spaces of performance and counter-performance can sometimes reproduce governing ideals of respectability yet can also deploy sexual and erotic agency to undo the gender, racial, and sexual inequalities that uphold normative orders. Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are bodily practices of differentiation that surface at the intersections of multiple forms of state ordering, moral regulation, self-discipline, and the systems of governance that endorse and make possible regimes of free citizenship. My overall aim is to show not only that we need to attend to sexuality and the body within the study of citizenship but, even more crucially, that we need to broaden our understandings of the underlying meanings of Caribbean freedom and emancipation by recognizing that intimate inter-bodily relations are the fundamental basis for human dignity and thus for freedom in its widest sense.

This historical study of post-slavery citizenship moves from the archival traces of the past toward the heterogeneous present, tracing how such practices of embodied freedom continue to inform the contemporary national, racial, and sexual geographies that arose out of post-slavery transitions in state power. I draw on feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory to explore the making of gender, racial, and sexual formations in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean, with special (though not exclusive) emphasis on Haiti and Jamaica, although wider Caribbean and transatlantic political formations also come into play. Unlike some studies that have been framed mainly in the tradition of women's history, my focus is on the making of men and masculinity as much as women, on formations of race and ethnicity as much as gender, and on transnational as much as national histories. Thus, this book tracks broader epistemological and methodological shifts—from women's history to gender history, from social history to cultural history, and from national history to transnational history—while always maintaining an appreciation of earlier approaches. Going beyond liberal accounts of the gradual yet seemingly inevitable extension of civil, political, and social rights to ever wider circles of inclusion, my approach to citizenship from below instead addresses the deeper constitutive struggles over embodied freedoms and embodied constraints within unequal interpersonal and international relations. In doing so, it calls into question the boundaries of national histories and isolated accounts of citizenship regimes, which ignore the comparative, transregional, and transnational relations through which freedom is exercised. The bodily politics of freedom extend both below and beyond the state.

In following the embodied tracks that people left on their journeys out of Africa, out of India, out of Europe—into the Americas, away from enslavement or indenture, into and around the Caribbean, into the diaspora, and back to many different homes, both physical and spiritual—this book tries to unearth a different kind of political history. It is a history etched by everyday actions, scrubbed by washerwomen's hands, dug into small plots of land, sewn into new fashions, danced to sacred rhythms honoring ancestral spirits. It is about all of the collective processes, public spaces, aesthetic forms, and material cultures that were mobilized in the struggles between erotic subjugation and erotic knowledge, both by those who were seeking to make the abolition of slavery into a living reality and by those who continue in their footsteps today. This is not to deny the importance of the state or of state-centered politics, which have so long been the subject of citizenship studies and of emancipation studies, but it is a broadening of our understanding of the grounds for political action, inspiration, and organization. It demands a larger vision of what citizenship in its fullest sense might mean. It challenges us to think about the limitations imposed on how we think about "freedom" and how this narrow idea of freedom has stunted our historical imaginations. And it brings into view the full humanity of gnarled hands and hardened feet, dusty earth and ancient trees, and the erotic actions (in the full meaning of the term "erotic," which I discuss later) of walking, dancing, writing, speaking, singing, drumming, and serving the spirits.

History is a kind of listening for traces of other lives beneath the frequencies of the present, for the past is not just an absence; it is below us, the grounding of the now. The past reaches up from below the waves of history, telling us something again and again, if only we can hear it. But often the volume is turned too low, and those who are living are too loud. Beneath the dominant citizenship regimes of liberalism and republicanism and the noisy politics of the public sphere are hints of an alternative Caribbean ideology of freedom, one grounded in the living sensual body as a more fully rounded, relationally connected, erotic, and spiritual potential.

IMAGINING CITIZENSHIP FROM BELOW

In what sense is citizenship made (or remade) from below? Citizenship from below not only refers to the struggles for state recognition by excluded subaltern groups who exist "below" the level of the citizen, as noncitizens or second-class citizens (i.e., the enslaved, foreign immigrants, women in many cases), but also alerts us to questions of embodiment, corporeality, and the "vulgar" (cf. Cooper 1993). It brings into focus the everyday aspects of physical life, the disavowed, and the abject (low class, low life, low brow, low down) that are usually excluded from the "high" political realm (high class, high politics, high minded, high and mighty). In this disavowed realm of Arendtian necessity and "bare life" (Agamben 1998), human being (or being human) takes shape through the intimacy of inter-bodily relations, spatial arrangements, and material exchanges. Nancy Stepan (2000: 65) argues that "the political questions of liberal rights and universalism always occur in a subtle exchange with that of anatomy," so that political and ethical arguments about individual rights are always converted into biological arguments about group differences. "The history of embodiment," she continues, "must be seen as part of the story of citizenship and its limits; and that it is no accident that 'race' and 'sex,' in their modern, primarily naturalized or biological meaning, emerged in the eighteenth century, when the new political concept of the individual self and the individual bearer of rights was being articulated." These bodily matters, anatomies, and necessities press up against the disembodied realms of high politics and constitutional law and lay bare the limits of civil, political, and social rights.

Recent Caribbean feminist research addresses questions of sex and sexuality in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in innovative and compelling ways, suggesting new empirical and theoretical questions around histories of embodied freedom, sexuality, legal regulation, and the state (e.g., Alexander 1994, 1997, 2005; Kempadoo 2004; Lewis 2003; Mohammed 2002). Yet the gathering significance of this body of knowledge has not been fully recognized, in part because it is scattered across diverse disciplinary fields, historical periods, and area studies. By integrating these critical approaches into an empirically grounded historical study of the Caribbean, this book aims to pose new questions about citizenship and freedom in post-slavery contexts. In doing so, it also explores how the complex historical intersections and inter-embodiments of race, gender, and sexuality in the Caribbean region might inform a theory of embodied freedom and erotic agency in wider contemporary contexts of the neocolonial restructuring of citizenship, sovereignty, and power across both national and transnational terrains.

The creation of an increasingly universal complex of citizenship throughout the world today can be seen as the outcome of long historical struggles in which enslaved and indentured workers, women and sexual minorities, indigenous peoples, peasants, migrants, and refugees have both challenged regimes of exclusionary citizenship and negotiated with states and with existing citizenries for inclusion. In so doing, they have transformed (and continue to contest) the meaning and practice of citizenship today. As many feminist theorists and historians have argued, the category of citizen historically excluded women, dependents, slaves, former slaves, and servants precisely because their bodies were stigmatized as overly sexual, emotional, and incapable of the higher rationality of disembodied objectivity, which was understood as a bourgeois, white, and heterosexual masculine trait (see, e.g., Fraser 1992; Glenn 2002; Landes 1988; Lloyd 1984; MacKinnon 1989; Pateman 1988; Ryan 1990, 1992, 1997; Smith 1997). In taking up positions as citizens and claiming fundamental human rights, many formerly enslaved, indentured, and otherwise undocumented people—and their descendants—have played a crucial part in contesting these exclusions, broadening the scope of freedom, and performing new embodiments of freedom. (Continues...)

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Excerpted from CITIZENSHIP FROM BELOW by MIMI SHELLER Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 History from the Bottom(s) Up 19

2 Quasheba, Mother, Queen 48

3 Her Majesty's Sable Subjects 89

4 Lost Glimpses of 1865 114

5 Sword-Bearing Citizens 142

6 "You Signed My Name, but Not My Feet" 166

7 Arboreal Landscapes of Power and Resistance 187

8 Returning the Tourist Gaze 210

9 Erotic Agency and a Queer Caribbean Freedom 239

Notes 281

Works cited 305

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

"A ground-breaking interdisciplinary achievement and contribution to the theory of freedom."

Anthropological Notebooks - Aija Lulle

[A] grounded, yet expansive contribution to the study of sexuality, citizenship and post-slavery societies.

Anthurium - Kate Houlden

Sheller joins this conversation on sexuality and social justice, with Citizenship from Below, which will be a useful tool in such dialogues—as well as in the hands of those ‘from below.’

Women's Review of Books - A. Lynn Bolles

"Citizenship from Below is an important contribution to debates about the complexities of citizenship, particularly in post-slavery, postcolonial societies. Mimi Sheller traces the relations between constructions of gender and sexuality, transnational and diasporic imaginaries, and the various incarnations of Caribbean societies, from the colonial to the postcolonial and nationalist. She expands our notion of citizenship by showing how it is constructed by the state over time amid changing circumstances, and by alternative politics and modes of belonging that emerge from 'below.'"—Deborah A. Thomas, author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica


"This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other. Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed."—Diana Paton, co-editor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing

From the Publisher

"[A]n extremely forceful and timely argument. . . . For Sheller, the exercise of sexual agency, while it may not necessarily transform the institutions through which inequalities have historically been structured, 'may enable some forms of maneuver, negotiation, and exchange' (p. 260). It is by training this lens on nineteenth-century Jamaica and Haiti that Sheller most profoundly complexifies traditional political histories of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. I believe this theoretical reframing is the most critical contribution of Citizenship from Below."
 

New West Indian Guide - Deborah A. Thomas

Citizenship from Below is a sophisticated, challenging, and ambitious book…. Sheller’s book is a masterful demonstration of the multidirectional, complicated, and ongoing process by which citizenship is constructed, appropriated, defined, and inhabited.… This book will be important and illuminating reading for historians of the Caribbean, of sex and gender, of citizenship, broadly conceived. It is indispensible reading for scholars interested in the fraught process of citizenship after slave emancipation, in particular.

Itinerario - Naomi J. Andrews